At the beginning of the Civil War, all the money was on General McClellan, to win the war for the Union. He was the public's idea of what a soldier should be - good looking, smooth talking, a great recruiter and trainer, an excellent politician who was very convincing in his briefings.
But he and those like him could not get the job done. The crucible of war exposed him for what he and many that held high rank in the Union Army at the time were actually skilled at.
They were not warriors who could get the job of the army done - winning battles - but bureaucrats who were skilled at the main job of a bureaucracy - looking after themselves.
In desperation, Lincoln turned to a man who had failed in the peacetime army and who had failed in civilian life. He turned to a man who had none of the smoothness and polish of a courtier.
He turned to a real warrior Grant.
It seems that only exceptional circumstances allow someone who can really do the job to have organizational power.
In the day to day world, the Churchills write books in the country, the Mandelas serve their prison sentence and the Grants get drunk. The bureaucrats run countries, banks, schools, armies, drug companies, government agencies and our lives.
My hope though is that the bureaucratic power is revealed for what it is by organizations that adopt the use of social software. My hope is that as millions of young enter the workforce expecting to use social software that they will open up the internal workings and "out" those that have little to say about the real work of delivering the result to the customer, or the voter, or the patient, or the student.
You can find my case on the Fast Forward Blog here.
